How Three Canadians Created a Cast of Characters for an International Peace Concert

It is quite amazing how life can take us in all kinds of different directions resulting in causal events unfolding that we had no idea would come to fruition.

That is exactly how the concept for an International Peace Concert became a reality, through a winding set of circumstances whose players connected by a common cause of Global Peace came to be.

It was in Venice Beach, California in 2004, when a man who was known to all the street urchins on the Boardwalk (it's actually made of asphalt and concrete) as "The Penny King", had been talking to Johnny Hatch, a musician from Canada, about how Americans have a difficult time with the subject of Peace.

It was a conversation that led to Johnny introducing "The Penny King, whose real name is Gabor Sandor Acs, to Doug Deep, another Canadian who made it big in Hollywood as a musician.

Gabor had immigrated to Montreal with his parents in 1957, after his father whisked him out of Budapest, Hungary during the Freedom Fighter's Revolution in 1956. He lived there till moving to Toronto several years later and after five years became a naturalized Canadian Citizen.

When his father, Janos Acs, announced that the family was moving from Toronto to Detroit due to his father's work, (His father was a journeyman tool and die maker at Chrysler for a decade) in 1967 he was only 12 years old.

He cried all the way to Detroit at the loss of more than 100 classmate friends and when they got there, buildings were burning, riots had demolished much of the downtown area, and hatred filled the air. He told his father, "I thought we got away from this kind of life when we left Budapest".

Gabor never lost sight of the fact that he was a peace loving Canadian Citizen who had been forced to move into a country whose military industrial financial media complex had war as one of its primary sub-products being exported to foreign lands.

Chrysler had built and tested hundreds of thousands of tanks for the U.S. Army not more than ten miles from their home in Sterling Heights, Michigan where he attended Davis Junior High and Adlai Stevenson High School before running away from home in 1973 and heading West to become a globe trotting gypsy.

Fast forward to Venice Beach, California where in May of 2004, the poet and music lover in Gabor met up with Johnny Hatch, whose band, Johnny Hatch and the Lost Disciples, came from Regina, Saskatchewan, and the discussion about global peace between three Canadian comrades ensued at Doug Deep's studios on Hollywood Boulevard in downtown Hollywood, California.

After watching Doug Deep and Johnny play guitar together during a four hour jam session in Hollywood, Gabor, by then a world famous financier convinced that there was a higher purpose to the music of these great musical men, in talking amongst the three of them agreed that a Canadian Peace Concert should be organized, promoted and held in Topanga Canyon, where Gabor was living by 2007.

The Canadian Peace Concert idea didn't sit well with the elitist Topangans who were tightly knit in the Los Angeles music industry and the idea, although broadly promoted in two local free newspapers, and over the Internet didn't get any traction. By then only four Canadian musicians had been found to help stage the event, but Gabor was not ready to fund something that had no traction.

"There was no broad based support for a peace concert, even though the leaders of the Topanga Peace Alliance were constantly organizing weekly vigils and peace rallies annually in downtown Los Angeles with hundreds of other interconnected groups supporting the cause of peace," says Gabor who personally carried the Topanga Peace Alliance Banner during one of the largest anti-war public demonstrations in Los Angeles County.

Now, in the year 2011 Gabor is reaching out via the Internet from his office in Soap Lake, Washington and is signing up artists from all over the world. Doug Deep is committed to Peace. So is Johnny Hatch. So are a lot of musicians around the world.

The artists are going to be paid from donations flowing through the Infinite Freedom Foundations founded by Gabor. George Soros, who is related to Gabor by Hungarian blood ties, is said to be considering supporting the concept, although he does invest in companies that provide war related materials to the Octodragon.

In the last thirty days, more than 30 artists from Canada, Austria, Britain, Australia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Russia, Africa, the Caribbean and the United States have committed to the date of July 4th, 2012 for what is being billed as the International Peace Concert which will be held in Soap Lake, Washington.

Damien Hamel, whose father was a famous jazz musician, recently relocated to Bremerton, Washington from LA says, "This is going to be bigger than Woodstock, LiveAid, FarmAide, all put together.

"Jessica Hedges, a country Cowboy Poet who has committed to attend the Independence Day Celebration in 2012 in Soap Lake as an entertainer says, "What a fantastic idea -I'm in!"

The planned event will get underway the last two weeks of June 2012, and the biggest acts will perform on July 4th, 2012.

Chris Joss, a very talented musician almost turned the gig down, thinking it was this July, but when he found it was scheduled for July 4th, 2012, he said, "Okay, I'm in!"